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Securing World Security
Security is a primordial need. It can be
documented as paramount in the long struggle we have made from the
darkest night of time, when we were still hulking around and living in
caves, to this day. Security means, above all else, the freedom from
fear, the need to feel safe in one’s environment. Everyone, who has any
awareness at all, knows this need. Parents of children and the children
of parents perhaps know this need more vividly than anyone else.
The evolution of humanity is evident in the history
of people endeavoring to create civilizations and societies that would
offer better and better conditions of safety and freedom from fear for the
health and growth of the inhabitants. Today, in a world that has, over the
centuries, evolved into what is in essence a global community, this basic
need for safety and freedom from fear is being exploited by a group of
individuals at a level and intensity greater than ever before. To increase
their own wealth and power, these persons are exploiting this basic human
need by imposing their will and designs on others through the use of force
and violence.
As always was the case, the exploitation of the need
is being manipulated through the generation and magnification of fear
which knows no boundaries and recognizes no limits. The goal of the
manipulation is to create such a condition of fear that people will be
willing to give up their personal and community freedoms to allow others
to protect them from the supposed threats to their safety and security.
Our need for security has always been manipulated in
this manner by the Dwellers on the Dark Side. Through their shallow and
venial tools, from petty criminals and con men to history’s despots,
demagogues and dictators, they manipulate humanity from all sides,
frequently managing to whip us into an emotional and irrational frenzy in
which brother kills brother.
The primary tool of manipulation is, as it has
always been, the vicious beast of fear and hate. This monster--created
eons ago by the Forces of Retrogression in their forges of darkness--has
emerged through the partly open “door where evil dwells.” Reconditioned
and updated with all the latest whiz bangs and bangles of science, it
“Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Today this monster, surrounded by a cloud of fear
and hate, has generated armies of followers in practically every nation on
the globe. We have huge world-wide fear and hate driven demonstrations of
insane destruction and killing. Real live maniacs are acting out by
blowing up and burning down entire sky-scrapers, hotels, churches, planes,
ships, trains, and busses full of people. Uncountable tons of bombs are
being dropped on population centers. The men, woman and children of many
nations including our Arab brothers and sisters, in more thousands than we
care to realize, are daily throwing their lives and limbs into this
frenzy.
These acts, create enormous waves of fear and hate.
They trigger immediate reactions on the part of those who are the targets.
The demand for retribution and revenge swell from these waves of fear,
engulfing reason and understanding. Thus the ancient nemesis of humanity,
the vicious cycle of fear, hate, destruction and revenge, continues to
churn.
This new fear generator is creating a world wide
market for big ticket security items which we think are absolutely
necessary to protect us, to make us safe. We have, for example, items like
Humvees, @ $175,000 each and tanks and planes. Who knows how much a tank
or plane costs? Millions of dollars is my guess. And of course, we have
the very expensive big “one use only” computer guided bombs. These seldom
hit their intended targets but they do blow up wherever they hit and
generate an awful lot of SHOCK AND AWE, and casualties.
Then there are the thousands and thousands of guns
of all kinds. We also have uncountable tons of explosives, shells, bullets
and rockets; and, of course there is the body armor which, even if they
have it, really doesn’t do that great a job of keeping bullets and
shrapnel out the bodies of our children, our husbands, our wives, our
fathers and our mothers. This brings us to the most morally expensive and mind boggling of all security products, the soldiers. It is hard to realize that at the highest levels of the corporate Security Business soldiers are considered to be simply products. Referred to as “troops on the ground”, the soldiers are needed, like any bomb or gun, to keep the illusion of security, the illusion that we are being protected, happening. We will be paying the cost for this product for a very long time.
It is interesting to realize that, by very far,
the largest generator of world-wide Terror is not al Qaeda or any of the
countries of the Middle East, including Palestine, Afghanistan or Iran.
And it was certainly not the ruined, desperate country full of starving
children that Iraq was on the eve of our heartless and mindless attack.
The largest generator of terror in the world is the United States of
America.
The United States Department of Defense and the
Homeland Security Department are the two major conduits of both the
creation of terror and the consumption of the security products, the use
of which create, not security, but more terror. These two departments of
our government generate more terror in one hour than all of the other
terror generators together can make in a week. These two bureaucratic
organisms, let us remember, are directed by the head of our government and
his close advisors. Let us not lose sight of this fact. The ultimate
problem is not with these bureaus, but with how they are being directed.
Between them, these two bureaus consume most of the
security related goods manufactured by the largest weapons and armaments
manufacturers in the nation, if not the world. They employ huge numbers of
persons, duly equipped of course, in the work of providing the illusion of
security from terror. We have in mind the Armed Forces, of course, but
also the police and the thousands, if not millions of people employed by
the Homeland Security Department. If this all is beginning to sound like a nightmare to you, that is because it is a nightmare. It is a really, really bad psychotic dream. The nightmarish quality comes vividly into view when one realizes that the only way that the heads of our government are offering to achieve the requisite level of safety from fear and terror is the generation of terror. They advise that we kill the terrorists before they kill us. They offer endless war against terror.
It should be clear by now
that the people from whom we are seeking protection are our own selves. By
a very wide margin, the major generators of terror in the world, the
greatest terrorists in the world are the very people who are supposed to
make us safe, to protect us from the terrorists.
It only takes a few moments
of thinking to understand why and how this situation evolved as it did.
Elementary psychology tells us that a person who is obsessed with
defending himself will see only threats to his safety in his environment
and will react in a variety of ways, damaging to both himself and his
environment. If the controlling point of view through which we see the
world, the point of view that tells us how to relate with other nations,
other communities of humans around the world, is characterized by an
obsessive defensiveness, we will be finding killers, maniacs, despots,
murderers, or “evil doers” in every corner of the globe and under every
bush.
Formerly, our nation was constrained by the basic moral position that we would not attack or engage in war with another country unless we were literally attacked by it. This contract for sane human relations is a corner stone of any democratic country and, therefore, of our country, The recent pre-emptive attack of Iraq was, as we all now know, based on a totally fabricated advertising campaign to generate the terror necessary to justify the attack. The persons who impulsed this message seem to believe it and continue to insist on its veracity. This is only revelatory of the depth of our nation’s problem.
It is important, however, to discriminate between the illusion that justified the attack and the more subtle motives that most often initiate and continue to drive obsessive compulsive defensiveness. The illusion is, obviously, that Iraq was threatening our security. The motives are a bit more complex.
Clear to most everyone, the surface motive that continues to drive this scenario is money. They did it for the oil! And, of course, there is the whole security business thing, the opportunity to sell/consume some, at present count, $200 billion worth of security products. (Could the reason we stopped pursuing Osma be that there wasn’t any money in it? Maybe it just wasn’t a viable market anymore.)
It seems, however, that there are deeper motives at work here, motives that drove our heads of government to violate one of our constitutional cornerstones, one of the basic precepts of our democracy. These motivating forces go by the names of hubris, greed and the lust for power. Having been recorded in myth, ancient history, literature, theater, poetry and song and demonstrated over and over again in recent centuries, it should be clear by this time that hubris, greed and the lust for power inevitably drive the afflicted person or group into immoral, and criminal activity and lead inexorably to paranoid delusions of many sorts and deep insanity. This, I take it, is what John Milton was trying to get across in Paradise Lost. And this, I take it, was the force that resulted in the Nazi effort to cleanse the race by exterminating the Jewish people.
So, realizing who or maybe we should say what
forces may be in control of our systems of government, we face the
present situation. If the heads of our government want to claim, for
whatever reason, that a country, any country, is threatening us, we can
expect a campaign to generate terror. When the terror threshold is
reached, that is, when enough people are scared enough to believe the
tenants of the campaign, we will attack that country. I am very
concerned in this regard about the rhetoric around Iran and North Korea
and their supposed atomic stock pile. Is this the beginnings of such an
ad campaign? Well, we could go on, but what we want to know, is whether there is a solution to this dilemma? The answer is yes, a very definite, yes.
This answer, obvious to many thinking people, is
that we need a different kind of interface with the world. We need a
government that is not anchored in the old concept of defense in the
concept of against-ness. What sense is there in having our primary
interface with the rest of humanity being a group of individuals whose
prime directive is to see otherness--other peoples from other
geographical locations, who may or may not have different cultures, with
different life styles and languages--as very possibly being dangerous
enemies, “evil doers” and worse? How is this a logical way to proceed
toward a secure and peaceful world?
We need a government that does not swim in its own
self generated sea of fear and hate. We need a government that does not
see the answer to every problem in terms of killing and building walls. Walls, as we learned over and over again through the Dark Ages, never have and never will protect us from ourselves. Humanity has evolved past walls into governments. We have evolved out of fear and into understanding and love of one another. The real killer is the delusion that the killer is on the other side of the wall. The wall is the killer of human dignity and freedom. As Robert Frost said, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out”
Building walls is a retrogressive and dark business.
We need a government that understands that The Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” is a concept that applies not just to the land we occupy and call The United States of America, but to the entire Global Community of Humanity. There are no people, no humans outside of this community.
I think that the Preamble of the Constitution of
the United States, and the Constitution it established and ordained
actually speaks to such a government. “We the People of the United
States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.”
This Preamble and the Constitution are not a wall.
These documents were not made to separate us from the rest of humanity.
They have in fact welded us to the world community. We have learned over
the past 200 plus years that there is in fact only one humanity, and to
our credit, up to now we have insisted on the innate value and freedom of
every individual.
We need a government that understands and is willing
to use the most powerful force in the three worlds, goodwill to “…form a
more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure
the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Obsessive defensiveness, a disease of self centered and separated people, does not work with the energy of goodwill. It does not look out on the world and see human beings, other men and women with children and dreams, other persons who have an innate need and right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It sees enemies, killers, danger and darkness. Goodwill looks out and sees light. It sees human beings in the struggle of life. It has love and understanding for all peoples and cultures. It is not stupid or naive. It knows the dark form the light, and it can see the way between.
We need a government that is anchored in the
concepts of with-ness of kind-ness. The concept of security should never
be separated from the concept of peace. Security, the freedom from fear,
lies in building bridges of understanding and appreciation of diversity.
Security lies in loving one’s neighbors as one’s self, for actually they
are ourselves. They are human beings. They are our kind. Goodwill
reveals the road of compassion and human kindness, that alone leads to
the place of peace, the place where security and safety abide. Can we finally understand that there is no security in war, that it is psychotic to pursue security through war? Security, safety is an aspect of harmony, of balance, of peace. The only way to implement the noble dream expressed in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States, is to create a climate of Peace, not just in the United States, but peace on earth. Such a climate can only be produced through the employment of the power of goodwill. This was His basic message over 2000 years ago.
We do not need a department of defense, friends, a
department that uses the energy of fear. We need a Department of Peace,
a department that employs the energy of Goodwill to secure our lives by
providing for a truly more perfect union, a union of the One Humanity.
Tom Carney
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